24 Hour Plays: Get Up and Go

At 7 a.m. Lou Moreno, one of the producers of the 24 Hour Plays was in the lobby of the American Airlines Theater looking energetic. “I was reading scripts on the train on the way in at 5:30,” he said, pointing out that the writers had indeed finished on time, some of them early in fact. The writers are nowhere to be seen at the moment, the room some of them used last night is empty. They have gone to bed.

The six directors — Peter Ellenstein, Leigh Kilton-Smith, Josie Rourke, Lynne Meadow, Lucie Tiberghien and Jessica Bauman — have been quietly reading scripts since 6 a.m. and choosing their top three choices. The team of producers is in a corner of the room assigning plays and soon they will announce the plan to the entire company, which began to assemble around 8:30 a.m. Rehearsals start at 9 a.m.